Tag: A Design Library

#ADesignLibrary: Designing With People, And Not Just for People

In my early encounters with @participateindesign (P!D), I recalled thinking they were a cross between a “ground-up People’s Association” and a “21st century SPUR”. These were the polar opposite models of community engagement in Singapore: the former a top-down state apparatus while the latter was a citizen-led think tank in the 1960s and 1970s that frequently challenged state planners with its alternative proposals, much to their chagrin. Against this antagonistic legacy between state and civic society, meeting P!D founders @mizahrahman_ and @janhlim in the 2010s was a breath of fresh air. Their cheery dispositions, aptly captured in their bright yellow “brand” colour, were matched by a clear and simple mission to design with people (including the now more receptive state planners). Over the years, it has been inspiring to see their work grow and I even had the pleasure of editing their 2016 publication “Designing with People and Not Just for People”. It’s an important contribution for a new generation of “woke” Sinngapore designers keen to engage people in their work.

Mizah may have tragically left us too early, but her vision still lives on through this book and the P!D team like @jensullivann and @archited88. This #ADesignLibrary post is dedicated to all of you.

#ADesignLibrary spotlights lesser known design books, and invites public access to my personal collection of titles that focuses on Singapore architecture and design, Asian design, everyday design, critical and speculative design as well as design theory and philosophy. I welcome enquiries and physical loans.

#ADesignLibrary: A New Program for Graphic Design

Graphic design has traditionally been dismissed as “surface”, a subject more concerned with aesthetics more than anything else. Thus, a part of contemporary design education is often devoted to studying the profession’s history and theories to prove its deep connections with the world we live in. “A *New* Program for Graphic Design” by designer David Reinfurt (2019) is a “textbook” that sets out to do just that. Based on a series of three courses originally developed to teach graphic design to liberal arts students at Princeton University, Reinfurt takes us on an alternative path from graphic design as a commercial art to view it as an “interface” where various disciplines meet. He holds up the likes of printer-publisher Benjamin Franklin and designers Bruno Munari, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Muriel Cooper, to show how graphic design has also historically been produced at where it meets with printing, photography, art, mathematics, computing and engineering. Abandoning the authoritative air of traditional texts for education, Reinfurt invites students to explore the network of rabbit holes he has personally dug— and to arrive at their own conclusions on what graphic design has become.

#ADesignLibrary spotlights lesser known design books, and invites public access to my personal collection of titles that focuses on Singapore architecture and design, Asian design, everyday design, critical and speculative design as well as design theory and philosophy. I welcome enquiries and physical loans.

#ADesignLibrary: Space Settlements (2019)

Masked up, isolated and confined in cramped spaces all day — life under lockdown feels very much like living in outer space. A deep dive into (or out towards?) Space Settlements (2019) by Fred Scharmen reveals the many parallels between constructing space habitats and on Earth. Examining a 1975 NASA study led by physicist Gerard O’Neil to design a space settlement, Scharmen reveals how the seemingly fantastical sci-fi endeavour was shaped by similar methods, concerns and solutions of 1970s modern architecture on planet earth. What is the spaceship but ”just an elevator with a higher top floor”? And the idea of “megastrucutres” advocated by Metabolists as flexible frames to construct cities were useful for space which had no ground. In fact, the empty slate of space only made apparent how much we take for granted when designing environments on Earth. Only by stepping out of home, can we see it that much clearer.

#ADesignLibrary spotlights lesser known design books, and invites public access to my personal collection of titles that focuses on Singapore architecture and design, Asian design, everyday design, critical and speculative design as well as design theory and philosophy. I welcome enquiries and physical loans.